My system is beginning to do random freezes. I have not updated my system in about 2 years, so I know it can not be from that.

One time I had my music playing off of the system and it hung. The song continued to play until ieven thought the system was hung. I rebooted afterwards.

I checked the logs...dmesg and /var/log/messages...and I can not find any kernel panics, memory errors, or software errors. So, I am ruling out ram. My system... is about 4 years old. My video card is probably 7 years. What would be the chances of my video card hanging the system?

It is possibly the video card (which driver?)... past experience with these unexpected hangs where everything goes dead is usually motherboard or PSU though.

If it plays music fine though the console is frozen and especially if you can still ssh into the machine, it's likely a bad video card or the driver went haywire..._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed to be advocating?

If it plays music fine though the console is frozen and especially if you can still ssh into the machine, it's likely a bad video card or the driver went haywire...

It's a NVIDIA video card and driver. But I haven't updated my system in about 2 years so no changes were made software wise. When the music was playing while the console/terminal was frozen, I tried to switch screens but couldn't. I don't know if that helps any in problem solving. I'm always in the X server.

Using the nvidia binary blob? I recall it able to soft reset the video card if something goes wrong (and it is able to detect when it freezes) as well as the ati blob. The OSS drivers for each I'm not as confident of them detecting GPU hangs and soft resetting them. In either case due to DMA they have the capability of corrupting memory and may not be recoverable.

If you've upgraded the kernel since the driver blob, it's worth to upgrade the blob driver as well. Seems nvidia has been releasing new binaries once in a while._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed to be advocating?